An Introduction to Time Banks: How Time Banks can strengthen a Sense of Community

      I have read and learned about time banks over the last few years, and what I have learned has led me to believe that time banks are quite possibly the best vehicle for building community and building connections between people in a community that I have come across.

     This Thursday at 6:30pm at Lakeshore Family YMCA, Transition Saint Clair Shores will be hosting a meeting on time banks. Transition SCS and The Lakeshore Family YMCA are in the process of starting a time bank in Saint Clair Shores and we would like to make the public aware of what a Time Bank is, how it can benefit our community, and why you should consider participating.   

      At its core, the concept of community is based upon the concept of "mutual aid." In the past, small, tight knit communities facilitated the exchange of goods and services using a "gift economy," in which members of the community would simply furnish you with goods and services when you needed them with the expectation and the cultural imperative that you would return the favor when they or someone else in the community was in need. Gift economies operated without a "real time" exchange where someone may be repaid for their efforts far into the future or with the piece of mind in knowing that the individual helped would "pay it forward" into the community at some point.

In a situation where you have a whole community where people may not know each other very well or even know eachother at all, a time bank provides a framework for building trust between members of a community through an organized process of mutual exchange in which each person's skills and talents are cataloged and each person's needs are cataloged as well.

Transactions of favors between individuals with matched goods and services can take place simply through barter. For example, one neighbor in a neighborhood may want to take Guitar lessons and have an in depth understanding of computers and the other neighbor may want to teach guitar and want to better learn how to use and service a computer. These two individuals could easily come to an exchange agreement, as each has something to offer the other for which the person has a demand.

However, there are many situations where barter breaks down, because the person that needs something does not have something to offer the volunteer that the volunteer has need for. This is where a time bank comes into play. The time bank can facilitate exchange of goods and services that would not otherwise take place by keeping track of the amount of time that an individual has spent serving the community and allowing those accumulated credits to be exchanged for goods and services in the broader community of the time bank. So the broader the time bank becomes, encompassing more people and a more diverse palette of available goods and services, the more effective and the more appealing it becomes.

As people participate in the community time bank, they become aware of how valuable the people around them are and how the community has allowed them a better quality of life without the exchange of any money. Time banks are particularly appealing for people who are retired, too young to get a job, the unemployed/underemployed and anyone who is short on money and long on time and talents.

I hope that you will join Transition SCS at the Lakeshore Family YMCA this thursday to learn about time banking with us.